U.K. marketU.S., U.K. military secrets e-mailed to factory hand

It is one thing to make a mistake, but to persist in it is something else. This must be the feeling at the upper echelons of the U.S. Air Force when it emerged last week that a Suffolk factory worker had been sent hundreds of e-mails outlining highly classified information, including documents detailing the proposed flight path of a visit to the region by President George Bush. The Web site Gary Sinnott had set up to promote the town of Mildenhall on the Internet also received e-mails about military tactics and passwords intended for personnel at the neighboring U.S airbase. It meant that top secret messages that terrorists would have given their eye teeth for were being sent to his private computer — and he found it impossible to stop them. EDP24’s Emily Dennis writes that what began as a slow trickle of mundane messages soon escalated and hundreds of classified e-mails were sent from around the world to Sinnott’s Web site after Air Force personnel mistook his Web site (www.mildenhall.com) for the military Web site (www.mildenhall.af.mil) (Sinnott’s Web site has been taken down two days ago).

Sinnott said that when he initially reported the problem airbase officials did not appear phased. “At first their attitude was we are not worried, we are American, our security is great.” This attitude changed, however, when he informed the base that he had received information detailing the flight path to be used by the plane carrying President Bush on a visit to the region, officials went “mental”: “It gave details of where the plane could be found in the air,” he said. “It was for a specific flight.” Sinnott also received military documents with a destruction notice on them. “I was told that you could get one of these on the net, but I looked and never found one,” he said.

Now after years of trying to resolve the issue, Sinnott has been forced to close down his Web site because he is unable to cope with the sheer number of e-mails arriving in his inbox every day. Sinnott, from Mildenhall, bought the domain mildenhall.com in the mid 1990s with the hope of using it to promote the town on the Internet, but it was not long before problems surfaced. He said: “I started getting them from people at RAF Mildenhall in 1997. It’s not uncommon for an e-mail to go astray, but it just continued. I was being sent everything from banal chat and jokes, to videos up to 15 mb in size. As time went by I started to get more interesting ones. Some were classified, some were personal. A lot had some really sensitive information in them. They were just banging in email addresses without checking.” No matter what name was entered before the address @mildenhall.com, the e-mail would go to Sinnott.

“Some people did not react well when I told them they were using the wrong email address,” he added. “Those most annoyed sold my address to people who send spam. Sometimes, I was getting 7,500 spam e-mails a week from one person.”

Sinnott said that despite officials at the base trying to help him, e-mails continued to flood in. “They asked me to change the way I did things to suit them, but what I was doing was nothing to do with the base,” he said. “These people were idiots.” Sinnott had hoped to make a new career out of his online venture, but after receiving 30,000 mostly spam messages a day he has been forced to close it down. “Unfortunately it’s never going to happen now,” he said. Sinnott will relinquish ownership of mildenhall.com later this month.

A statement released by RAF Mildenhall last week confirmed that officials had tried to help Sinnott. It said: “In November, we confirmed that our base servers blocked any e-mails going to this site and we sent out a base-wide e-mail advising everyone to use appropriate government e-mail domains and inform family and friends. In 2004, the 100th Communication Squadron advised Mr. Sinnott to block unrecognizable addresses from his domain and have an auto-reply sent reminding people of the official Mildenhall domain and blocked his website from access on base.” A letter sent to Sinnott from Richard Fryer, squadron leader, RAF commander, in November, stated: “Unfortunately, there is no mechanism to forcibly prevent individuals, when in their private capacity, from sending e-mails to a particular address. Nethertheless, I can assure you that we do take your problem seriously but regret that there is little more we can reasonably do.”